Propaganda?

Here’s a ‘new’ poster, designed by Shepard Fairey, the guy who adapted an AP photo of Barack Obama into a HOPE poster etc which sold gazillions, sparking AP to come after him for using their intellectual property without acknowledgment or royalties. (I personally think they had a point. Fairey’s unacknowledged use of the AP image went beyond ‘fair use’.)

Mannie Garcia's photo and Fairey's treatment

Anyway, this new poster features a gorgeous actress/model Olivia Wilde) dressed reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty holding a bullhorn and a clipboard — to promote the American Civil Liberties Union.

ACLU is an organisation whose courageous activists/whiste-blowers have been at the forefront of the civil right movement for decades.

‘Leading freedom forward’ — yeah it’s propaganda, but sometimes we need the encouragement of a slogan. Good on them.

The actress who acted as model for the poster, Olivia Wilde said this:

I believe we have to judge our society not by how we treat the privileged and the empowered, but by how we treat the silenced, the condemned, the undocumented, and all those whose views and rights are deemed inconvenient. The ACLU works tirelessly to uphold the promise of the Constitution, and I am proud to support their courageous and necessary work.

A friend of mine, and fellow inconvenient truthteller, recently copped a nasty, threatening curse-filled phonecall from someone who feels aggrieved by having a whistle blown on their dodgy activities. As I said elsewhere, it takes guts — “courageous and necessary work” to use Olivia Wilde’s epithet.